Robert Vishniak is the favored son of Oxford Circle, a working-class Jewish neighborhood in 1970s Philadelphia. Handsome and clever, Robert glides into the cloistered universities of New England, where scions of unimaginable wealth and influence stand shoulder to shoulder with scholarship paupers like himself who wash dishes for book money. The doors that open there lead Robert to the highest circles of Manhattan society during the heart of the Reagan boom where everything Robert has learned about women, through seduction and heartbreak, pays off. For a brief moment, he has it all...but the world in which he finds himself is not the world from which he comes, and a chance encounter with a beautiful girl from the old neighborhood, and the forgotten life she reawakens, threatens to unravel his carefully constructed new identity.

What's your "waiting on" pick this week?

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On Thanksgiving Day 2007, as the country teeters on the brink of a recession, three generations of the Olson family gather. Eleanor and Gavin worry about their daughter, a single academic, and her newly adopted Indian child, and about their son, who has been caught in the imploding real-estate bubble. While the Olsons navigate the tensions and secrets that mark their relationships, seventeen-year-old Kijo Jackson and his best friend Spider set out from the nearby housing projects on a mysterious job. A series of tragic events bring these two worlds ever closer, exposing the dangerously thin line between suburban privilege and urban poverty, and culminating in a crime that will change everyone’s life.

What's your "waiting on" pick this week?

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From the prominent New York Times food writer, a memoir recounting the tough life lessons she learned from a generation of female cooks, including Marion Cunningham, Alice Waters, Ruth Reichl, Rachael Ray, and Marcella Hazan. (Amazon)

From the author of Wintering: A Novel of Sylvia Plath comes a funny, touching memoir of a crummy—and crumby—childhood. Filled with the abundance and joy that were so lacking in Kate’s youth, Cakewalk is a wise, loving tribute to life in all its sweetness as well as its bitterness and, ultimately, a recipe for forgiveness. (Amazon)

Also, I love the annual installments of Best Food Writing...and I just came across a similar series, Cornbread Nation (fifth edition just released), which spotlights the best of Southern food writing each year. Anyone familiar with these? Worth checking out?

Thursday, May 13, 2010

I just finished Brunonia Barry's The Map of True Places, and I enjoyed it so much that I went back and picked up The Lace Reader (I know, I'm the very last person to read this). I had it in my head that it would be too "mystical" for my taste, but after reading her latest, I had to read it...because, well, I love her now.

In the meantime, several books came up on my library list that I've been tap-tap-tapping my fingers waiting for:

Hedda Chase is a top-flight executive producer at Gladiator Films, fast-tracked in the business since she graduated from Yale. An aggressive businesswoman, she recently pulled the plug on a film project initiated by one of her predecessors. The screenwriter on the project was Hugh Waters, a wannabe with a dead-end marriage and a day job at an insurance company. This script was his ticket out--until Hedda tampered with his plans, claiming his violence was over the top, his premise not credible, and his ending implausible. Hugh decides to prove otherwise by staging his script's ending and casting Hedda Chase as the victim. He flies to Los Angeles and finds Hedda, kidnaps her, and locks her in the trunk of her vintage BMW in the parking lot at LAX. He leaves the keys in the ignition, the parking ticket on the dash, and lets "destiny" take its course.

What's your "waiting on" pick this week?

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In a quirky farmhouse outside Boston, seventy-year-old Percy Darling enjoys a vigorous but mostly solitary life—until, in a complex scheme to help his oldest daughter through a crisis, he allows a progressive preschool to move into his barn. The abrupt transformation of Percy’s rural refuge into a lively, youthful community compels him to reexamine the choices he’s made since his wife’s death, three decades ago, in a senseless accident that haunts him still. No longer can he remain aloof from his neighbors, his two grown daughters, or, to his shock, the precarious joy of falling in love.

What's your "waiting on" pick this week?

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